I run PLA with a nozzle temp of around 190C although I tend to fine-tune this depending on the particular batch of filament I'm using. I don't have enormous faith in the exact temperature as I don't know how accurate my thermocouple is, but that's a reasonable starting point anyway. You should certainly get a continuous fine thread of filament coming out - anything else means poor print quality.
Definitely a problem if you can't feed filament by hand, and it sounds like nozzle not hot enough or blocked - good luck with unblocking what's in there at the moment!
I'm interested to see how you get on with the PID controller. I spent quite a lot of time tuning the parameters of mine (built into the Sprinter code) to get best warm-up time with minimum overshoot and best stabilisation. I have built a couple of hot ends with different heater power and now have two different sets of PID parameters (especially the P and I components) to get best results. I'm curious to know if the commercial PID controller has some kind of self-learning to achieve the same results.